


Elegy to a Lost World

by D_Myrr



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Eventual Romance, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Hogwarts Era, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-11-02
Packaged: 2020-11-25 19:28:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20917337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/D_Myrr/pseuds/D_Myrr
Summary: Where an attempt to right the wrongs wrought in the past and fix a soon to be broken world brings together two time travelers and takes them on a journey of mutual self discovery. Dramione. Semi AU. Time Travel. Starts at the beginning of year 5.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Harry Potter and its characters are the exclusive property of JK Rowling. This is just a work of fanfiction and I make no money from this.
> 
> That out of the way, this is my first work on Ao3. I wished to experiment with a scenario where two people who have lived through a dystopian future for ten years experience an emotive disconnect when they are transported to the past. Felt it would be an interesting scenario. 
> 
> As a background, unlike in canon, the horcrux hunt here failed miserably. Without authorial intervention and ludicrously fortuitous circumstances, they were able to locate and destroy one horcrux in over a decade. That's the time from which Draco and Hermione are.

**Chapter 1**

What surprised Draco Malfoy the most about his death was that he'd lived to be twenty-seven. The Order of the Phoenix was gone by then. He himself had stamped out their dying embers the year past, though for six years he had served amongst their ranks in the capacity of a highly placed spy, undertaking for both sides a role that Severus Snape, his sort of mentor, had played in the past before being discovered and boiled alive. But even as that clumsily cobbled together rebellion finally crumbled with Potter's death, and the smattering of dissidents still left, under the leadership of one Hermione Granger, fought on and eventually fell to the omnipotent wand of the all-knowing Dark Lord— who, over the years, had in fact, become a God: turned the skies incarnadine, dried the seas, spattered across the streets, with fitting indignity, the entrails of those that tried fleeing country— even as all that happened, he had found it necessary, by circumstance, for his mother's security, to separate himself from them, the Order; and Hermione Granger died unaided, sent to her death by faulty information Draco divulged, dealt with personally by the Dark Lord. Draco had sympathized; for, over the years, he had come to tolerate her; even had with her, post her husband's death, an intermittent on and off affair— a shallow one, to be sure, that did not go beyond skin; and when each such wretched instance was over, they wrenched away from one another and went their separate ways and were once again strangers... but, there had been something.

He'd been perfectly happy to look past those asinine deaths, to let bygones be bygones. He'd set aside his guilt, soothed his jaded coil, and allowed himself be rewarded for his toil. He'd taken for himself a share of the carved-out spoils in this country of ash. He'd buried in his bosom his secret sympathies and continued functioning as the Dark Lord's right hand. For a year he had been a governor of sorts of this new world carefully constructed in the image of the Dark Lord, over the ruins of a society that had once defied him. Power was readily redistributed amongst those that deified him: even his erstwhile master wasn't immune to flattery. Anyone suspected of any form of treason was summarily executed.

But then the scaffold had snapped off the neck of Narcissa Malfoy, for some sympathy she'd supposedly demonstrated somewhere along the line. Draco had gone half mad with grief. She was all he had, all he'd had since father had died in a raid nine years ago. Rebellion had strung him up, raised his arms, roused his soul; and he, for the first time in his life, had preferred an honest death to a dishonest duty.

So he'd fought a God.

It'd been a short strife, punctuated by a set of iridescent flashes— and though survival had been suffering, he had hoped, even in forsaking that suffering, to drag with him to the drudgery of death's deepest drain the earth corrupting stain of his master's soul. He had failed. A cascade of spell fire; the clatter of his broken wand; the string cut, soul shut riff raff of pain that had broken through to his brain; and it was over, all finally over: he'd successfully exchanged the penury of a miserable life for the perdition granted by permanent death. Mist descended and claimed for itself the last of his laborious breath: it'd burst forth in a bubble of blood. The sickly soul sped away from the casket of its constitution. Death crept up to him and tenderly kissed his bitter brow— like his mother would— before draping in a vermeil, worm woven pall his corpse: a blessedly bloody corpse rent beyond recognition, as insignificant and sore to sight in death as in life.

So, to find in a puff of breath the promise of life; to feel as though he'd been given the chance to relive once again this accursed strife and bring it to a different end was... to the say the least, utterly fucking inconvenient.

* * *

Draco had woken the day before school began, and he had been woken up by a bloody elf. He'd screamed bloody murder and lashed out, and the elf had upended upholstery and scurried away. Luckily, no one had come calling. He'd taken thirty minutes to scratchily summon up some semblance of control, courage even, slammed his occlumency barriers into place, and then strode out of the room.

While sitting across his father at the dining table and smearing marmalade over his, Draco's, toast, he had calmly contemplated both the surreality of this situation, and suicide; then his—very alive—mother had swept in and swept him into a hug, and asked, in apparent concern, if he was feeling under the weather, since the elf said he was; and Draco had found himself saying, _no, no, mother, it is nothing, nothing at all; just homework, and grades, and that filthy little mudblood, Granger, who beats me at everything, every subject._ She'd laughed and patted his head and sauntered off, and he'd sworn— sworn though his father was looking at him oddly, and with the slightest hint of condescension starting off on a lecture on how it was unbecoming to be second best at anything to a mudblood—that he'd do whatsoever he had to, to save his family, keep them all alive.

* * *

_The issue is_, he thought, straightening his tie as he absently occupied a vacant compartment in the Express, _I am still at the start of year five_.

Still a child, still utterly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, still supposedly a proud ponce prancing through adolescence. Known to the Dark Lord merely as Lucius Malfoy's son; known to Dumbledore and the order as a non-entity; and only somewhat indulged, with a tolerant sigh, by Severus Snape, who, as it turned out, was in fact a spy for Dumbledore, and who would at some point in the future wish he were a transfigured turnip instead; it would surely be infinitely preferable to his eventual fate at the hands of the Dark Lord.

"What a waste," he murmured, tucking his trunk into the top most rack. Draco dusted a dirty seat with a dainty dab and settled down; then let the chameleonic arm of behaviour reach behind carefully crafted barriers of occlumency and borrow from his mind the dusty tome of personal memory: this he then (metaphorically)sheaved through, eager eyed, mostly in an attempt to gather data on, and put up a façade of, 'what the fuck Draco Malfoy was like in year five'.

There wasn't much to go on. His memory was constrained to a modest selection of misinterpreted highs that at one time had brought with them a rush of blood, a flush of ambition. But now each event when considered singularly felt altogether colourless and entirely bloodless: as though his life at that time were a slow burn tragicomedy played out in black and white; as though each memory had degenerated to ash and been stuffed into an urn and left to atrophy; as though, after all these years, he had turned back the clocks and clumsily clutched at that urn, that crumbling relic, and discovered that it wasn't just a spool of memory that had been subsumed, but himself too, his very person— a persona that he had, moving beyond lost experience, or perhaps drawing from it, constructed anew in a different mould.

But that Draco Malfoy: that Malfoy from year five who had been made prefect and used that power to antagonize Harry Potter; who'd revelled in the society of Dolores Umbridge and was reviled throughout school; who'd sneered at Dumbledore's silly pronouncements and supposed that the Slytherin Gryffindor school dynamic was a steeple of the real world, an adequate approximation of it; that Draco Malfoy had died over a decade ago, died when he had turned his wand on Dumbledore and said those wretched words, _Avada Ked_—

At some point, he'd shut his eyes, so when the compartment door slid open he was caught by surprise.

He turned, expecting it to be Crabbe or Goyle. What he got, instead, was Hermione Granger.

Draco Malfoy froze. His mind short circuited, and the memory of their last ever interaction rushed back: _I am telling you the truth. Hogwarts hides a horcrux. And anyway, what alternative do you have, Granger, other than to trust me?_ She hadn't believed him. She had suspected she was being set up to die. She'd probably seen something in his eyes, yet she'd scampered off with the hair brained guts of a Gryffindor and the steel of someone who died by proxy with each friend cut down, and only held contempt for the real thing...

For the briefest of moments, he felt horrible guilt. Then he schooled his face into a sneer and stared at her...only to be somewhat unsettled by the glimmer of recognition, the smouldering rage, the abortive attempt at drawing a wand that the phantom twitch of her clenched right hand gave away. She'd disliked him in school, but, if memory served, never been actively antagonistic in her attitude.

Then he suddenly knew. And, going by her expression, so did she.

She was, however, quicker than him on the draw.

In an instant he found himself disarmed and plastered against the compartment window, mentally cursing fate, luck, and the muggle Gods he'd seen his odd would be victim worship. The compartment door slammed shut, and he heard the tell-tale click of a latch and the whisper of an advanced locking charm.

_Fuck._

He sighed. Pressed to a window; subject, like a dissected insect set up on a slide for inspection, to the predatory gaze of an unflattering face; witness to the shockingly barren scenery outside—treetops that looked like inverted beards of an imagined Dumbledore.

What a fucking shit way to die a second time.

"I suspected, you know, that you were sending me to die," Hermione said flatly.

He rotated his head and risked a glance; then shrugged and said, "The Dark Lord can be _very_ persuasive."

He'd expected the jab of her wand against a vein in his neck. Then a few bitten out bitter words, followed by the finality of the blood boiling curse. Then to be transfigured into a twig and thrown under the train. She'd been a healer when Saint Potter—set up by Dumbledore, slain by the Dark Lord— passed away. She'd been twenty-two and hovering in the background. After his death, however, she had been thrust to the forefront by circumstance. Hermione Granger had coped well with prominence and infamy. Over the next four years she cultivated a reputation for ruthlessness and creative curses, for a liberal application of the dark arts. She had fought the Dark Lord thrice, in three different raids, and made it out alive each time, albeit with a slice of good fortune on each instance. Desperation had twisted her, turned her into what he thought was a watered-down version of his aunt. But where Bellatrix Lestrange's intelligence was more the function of a reptilian brain and a base desire to break everything she set her eyes on, Hermione Granger, to the very end, had been more calculated and controlled. Nor was she entirely devoid of finer human sentiment, or the ability to occasionally rise above the monotony of mere murder, and surprise through spontaneity.

It was this ability she now demonstrated by flippantly occupying the seat across instead of straight away flaying him alive. He sent a prayer to the gods for small graces.

"I trusted you, Draco" she said, tilting her head. She'd regained her composure. "Even at the end. Even when I said I didn't. And it cost me my life. But, let's leave that be." She sighed and stared out of the window.

He raised an eyebrow.

"You won't kill me, then?"

"Not for that, no," Hermione said. "Unlike you, I possess a modicum of maturity. And, at some level I instinctively knew ...betrayal was more than a remote possibility."

"How generous," he bit out, attempting and failing to move his arms. "And how befitting the glory and the mercy of light. Yet, I observe that I am in a partial body bind."

She looked at him for a long moment. "I haven't decided what to do with you yet," she settled for eventually saying.

He looked at her in disbelief.

"You came here looking for me—" he began, a flush of fury dusting his cheek.

She cut him off.

"For Harry," she said, and her tone that till then had been flat acquired the lustre of some implacable emotion.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I was looking for Harry and Ron."

"It isn't them plastered to a wall and held hostage at wand point, is it?"

A hint of hostility crept into Hermione's eyes, but when she spoke her tone was level.

"You're a death eater. You ended a flagging revolution through deception. This is me exercising caution."

He couldn't fault that logic.

"So why am I not dead, then?"

"Because," Hermione said softly, "I am trying to determine whether or not you could be of some use to me."

"I am, as you succinctly summed up, a death eater, and thus not to be trusted."

"And also best placed to once more be a spy," she said. There was a crafty glimmer in her eye; one entirely at odds with freckled teenage face that she now wore at the behest of fate. He suppressed a shudder. There was something grotesque about _that_ gleam on this feckless face; Hermione Granger at this time was supposed to be moral and upright, a steadfast defender of the light who readily bowed to the whims and megrims of authority, far removed from the callous bitch she would be in ten years' time.

"This time, I have no intention to take up that vocation," Draco said pleasantly. "But even if I were to..." he grinned, "I sent you to your death once. What stops me from doing it again?"

"And there lies the rub," she agreed, as though they were earnestly discussing parliamentary proficiency over tea and toast, and not Draco being potentially murdered in cold blood. "You are worth something as a spy, but unworthy of the hassle otherwise."

Oh, she'd do it too. He'd seen her handiwork in the past. War had eroded her morality and imposed its own makeshift set of principles.

"Then deem me unworthy and do away with me," he spat out. "I'd rather die than be indoctrinated into the Dark Lord's service again; and I _will not_ be _your_ spy, Granger."

"I see," she said contemplatively. A speck of sympathy smoothed out her countenance."He killed you too, didn't he? No, don't try hiding it; I can see from your face that I am right. You were always easy to read, Draco, at least to me. But I am sorry to discover that you too met that fate." Infuriatingly, she was being genuine. She'd known and respected how jealously he treasured his family, and she was smart enough to put two and two together.

"Spare me your faux sympathy." Draco ground his teeth and avoided her eyes.

"Very well." She pursed her lips and steepled her fingers. "I thought I was the only one here, in this time, and I intended to take all my information to Dumbledore, but—"

"To that doddering fool?" He was astonished. She'd been a huge advocate of his till they discovered a day before Potter's death that he'd been set up to die all along, and that Dumbledore had known; Dumbledore had always known. After that, she'd treated his memory with indifference.

"He is a scholar and an able leader, and above all else a good man. And I... was, and still am, desperate." A candid admission.

"Desperate enough to go to _Dumbledore? _After everything he's done? His masterplan to beat the strongest Dark Wizard of all time was to send off three children on a wild goose chase. We saw Snape's memories. Dumbledore spent half his final year trying to redeem the boy that would go on to kill him. He left the fate of the world in the hands of a poorly funded, inadequately armed, thoroughly ill-equipped militia of the incompetent kind, and—"

Hermione interrupted him just as he was working up steam, starting to froth at the mouth, revelling at this opportunity to take out the frustrations of his current situation on that feckless fop of a mouldering fool.

"I'd do _anything_," she said quietly, "to spare the people I love their prior fate."

And he found himself at a loss for words.

They sat like that for a minute. Then she flicked her wand and he felt the body bind fall off. She tossed him his wand and stood.

"I must leave now. Prefect duties to attend to. If I remember right, then you have them too." Her words were clipped, her tone curt. "I initially intended that I either kill you, or make you swear an unbreakable vow. But I knew back then that you were lying to me, and I know now that you are telling me the truth. You don't intend to interfere, and you don't intend to side with Voldemort. I can respect that. For now."

Hermione Granger straightened her robes and offered him a neutral nod.

"Stay out of my way, Draco," she said. "I'd rather not see you around. And if I hear that you are indulging your Death Eater cronies again, I _will _kill you."

Then she left the compartment, not once looking back, leaving in her wake a very, very puzzled Draco Malfoy.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I actually forgot that Hermione had spent her summer at the OOTP headquarters, so she wouldn't actually be seeing Harry for the first time and would've seen him before the train ride. For the purposes of this fic, however, that little detail has been altered (it wasn't relevant to OOTP anyway, tbf): Hermione here spent her summer with her family and not at the OOTP headquarters, so she has indeed only met Harry once this summer, and that's at Diagon Alley three days before the school year started.
> 
> There might be some canonical inconsistencies, as it's been ages since I last read HP. So apologies for that.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who commented last time, and I hope this one is to your liking too!

**Chapter 2**

"In here, Hermione."

The first time she heard _that_ voice again, the soothing syllables, though ordinary, seemed suddenly liquid in phonetic symphony, suddenly synonymous with her melting heart. She heard him clearly though her back was turned— the smooth sound conjoined with air and flowed toward her over the din like the emerging crest of a wave breaking the surface of a silent sea. Then that sound structure solidified into meaning; reaching through time into the attic of far removed memory she assigned to it an identity.

"Harry," she said, turning and smiling. They were momentarily the same age again, and despite the decade long distance between them she felt a sense of relief, a sense, though on second thought slavish, of having a higher power to prostrate herself before, a sun to circle around— Harry was here; he'd save everyone; everything would be all right.

She stepped into the compartment, then stood stunned; for she saw on his face a lost look that time, in her time, had rendered transient. His spirit had been soiled and spoiled and sapped away, till there was nothing left of her Harry, till his time torn identity, whittled down from Harry as luminary to Harry as horcrux, Harry as ragged ensign of sacrifice, hung heavy over them like a cumulous cloud that would someday break and bring with it a flood of grief from which they would never be free.

The uncertain smile he offered her rendered in sharp contours his future self's misery and the magnitude of his—their— loss. It snapped her out of her subconscious self-indulgence; a swell of sick grief like torrential rain poured through her being and soured the swansong her heart had sung when she first heard his voice. She couldn't look to him for leadership: he was too young, too free, too innocent to be sent once more down that downhill journey, the downward slope of death. She'd save him, she'd save him, she'd—

"You alright?" Harry was looking at her in concern.

Though she'd spaced out, her leaden limbs had led her to the window seat, the one by his side, as was her place. They were all there, all founding members of what, in their future and her past, would come to be called Dumbledore's Army. Harry himself, Ron, Ginny, Luna, Neville…and she remembered how each had died, and by whose hands, and with how much pain; saw instead of these faces the ones they had once worn— contorted, cut to ribbons, mouths moving feebly in a hapless plea for death. She'd herself stood over most and fulfilled her wretched duty as medic, watched helplessly as they ceased to be; though ceased to be was a euphemism that undersold the agony, the utter agony…

They'd ceased all conversation and were watching her closely, waiting for something…

She gripped the grooves of the slatted windows, white fingered, white faced, then offered Harry a watery grin.

"I'm fine Harry," Hermione said. "I'm just…so happy to see you. It's been so long."

His face creased and his eyebrows went up. "We met three days ago at Diagon Alley," he said.

Hermione coloured. Ron sniggered. Normality was restored.

"I'm sorry," she mumbled. "Spaced out a bit there." Even she could hear in her voice the tremor of a sentimentality long suppressed. The underside of each eye was pricked by a secret urge to cry. She hadn't burst into tears in years; that part of her had passed away with Harry's death; though, of course, there was still the odd moment when frustration—product of participating in a lost war— would cause the eye to cloud and shed a few drops of a counterfeit grief.

Ron and Harry weren't particularly perceptive—not in their last life, and even less so in this one, given their age; but she could tell from the glance they exchanged that they were worried.

"Did something happen?" Ron was trying ever so hard to sound casual and keep the concern in his voice from showing. "You weren't at the prefects meeting either."

Ah, that. He'd inadvertently given her an out.

"I ran into Malfoy." She saw their countenances play out their preconceived prejudices of Malfoy, pertinent of course to the ponce they knew and fully justified by him in their time, though less so in hers—but they couldn't possibly know that; and she felt a stirring of guilt, which she quelled, and a sensation of relief, which welled, at having successfully diverted any nascent suspicion.

The rest of her ride was spent listening to Ron rant about Malfoy and Harry reassure her that no matter what he'd said, what threats he'd made, the two of them would be there for her, would see that he be foiled at every turn.

Though elated, she fought the urge to roll her eyes. Even in adolescence, men were so predictable.

The triumphal din of three hundred voices celebrating reunion rose in a raucous roar and reverberated off the walls, resembling for a moment in its thunder the constant clash of a thousand swords slashing, swirling, twirling through the air— but they had all returned from war, all from the dead; or so at least it was in her head, which like a palpitating heart pounded in protest against the induced vertigo of seeing friend and foe all alive, all young, all free, though the serpent of division, she could see, had already in whispers seduced to its side a sizeable proportion of the school population.

They had not seen each other two months, but she had not seen them a lifetime. And there was Harry next to her; Harry who spooned down each sweet pea moodily, as though he were running through his repertoire of recent memory —still in that graveyard, still with Cedric, the good cheer from their train journey all but gone: school tonight had not been good for him. He'd spoken with Seamus Finnigan in the school hall before sorting, and there had been words exchanged; and where at one time she would've stepped in and stopped them both, now it all seemed too surreal: there was Seamus; Seamus still alive; Seamus, who with his last cry had begged her that she not leave him to die, that she drag him out of a pit of Inferi; and she had failed him, failed him like the rest.

Her failure, like an infloresence of mutating phosphorescent flowers rotting with canker, flamed all around her: there sat Theo Nott, whom she had failed to kill in the raid at Surrey, and who in turn had gone on to torture to death and string up by their innards the Patil twins; there Gregory Goyle, who took to his training like a fish to water, and wiped out forever the scattered remnants of the Weasley line; and there, next to Draco, Pansy Parkinson, who went from pug-nosed busybody to putrid death eater that to prove her loyalty to Voldemort had flayed alive a crippled Minerva Mcgonagall, thus sealing in sin an enduring fealty to the cause, a loyalty only ended at the very end, at the end of Hermione's wand.

She had an urge to scream, to stand up, to whip out her wand and wipe out all of Slytherin. To condemn them all to a dog's death for crimes they were yet to commit. If that was folly, then it was folly no worse than what had been done to her friends and family, all sentenced, for no fault of theirs, to a starved suffering on the fringes of a dystopian society; all like so many flies swatted away, laid low —nameless, faceless, gutters for graves...

She'd go insane if she stayed here. Her blood was boiling. She hated them all. She'd kill them all. Every last one of them.

"Could you do my share of prefect duties for the night, Ron? I don't feel very well." She shook her head, as though to clear it, and stood.

"Merlin, Hermione. You look like death. Did Malfoy do something to you?" Ron looked alarmed. .

"No, no, it's nothing. I'm just really tired. Could you cover for me?"

"'Course I can. It's just escorting a few firsties anyway. You go and sleep."

"Thanks. Owe you one." She slunk to the end of the hall, stepped into the shadows of the double doors, then froze.

She'd caught a glimpse of Dolores Umbridge, who was seated at the far end of the teachers' table.

Dear God.

She had almost forgotten that hag.

Umbridge had succeeded Thicknesse as Minister of Magic. The three years that her reign of terror lasted had seen her supervise the construction of muggle styled concentration camps designed to protect the well being of pureblood society by purging from it all things she deemed an impurity.

Bar Hermione, every unfortunate muggleborn stuck in Britain— sealed off from the rest of humanity and sealed up in this cold casket for dead liberty— had wound up there. After the Order assassinated Umbridge, it took them weeks to even excavate the stacks of burnt bodies buried underground, and years to assign to each of them an identity, to reconstruct through spell the symbolic smile of a reasoned human being now turned to residue; so that if by some stroke of luck they were survived by family, then the fire consumed remains could at least be, with adequate regrets, conveyed, and a proper burial offered.

There weren't many, however, whose families already hadn't been tried and put to death for the crime of harbouring an undesirable.

Hermione watched that fiendish face crack a grin and malevolently observe the din, watched it take in with ill wreathed ambition and glee the division; the pulse of division that even now, like a ripple across a stream, ran through the room, rose to the roof with the swirl of sound; division struck at the roots of this magical institution, turned this tree of knowledge, that with bent yet not broken bough had withstood the tempest of two wars and the whirlwind of tradition, a little less magical, a little more mortal; brought it a little closer to its eventual, time tested perversion— gone forever would be the breath of arcane magic, future generations exposed instead not to pristine halls and pristine walls but a cobble cracked, brimstone wracked false temple subjugated to the service of a false faith.

She saw red, and was only subconsciously aware of the answering call of her magic, that like an applied anaesthetic eased away the pain; she raised her wand, whispered the first syllable of a dark curse she'd devised...

…and was rudely tugged out of the shadows cast by the double doors and flung across the flagstones of the corridor outside.

The shock of her fall broke the sway of vengeance.

"_Unlike you, I possess a modicum of maturity._" It was Malfoy, and he looked furious even as he marched towards her and threw back at her her words from the train."Fucking Hell, you utter nitwit. Keep a lid on your emotions."

She picked herself off the floor and looked at him in disbelief.

"_You _are telling me this? You?"

"It wasn't I that lost control and nearly assassinated a high profile ministry stooge in full public view." His hands were shaking; his countenance was twisted; he still hadn't regained any semblance of composure. "If I hadn't suspected that this might happen when I saw you stand up and walk off—"

"What I do," Hermione hissed, "is none of your business." Though, of course, she too knew that he was right. Umbridge had been half a second away from finding her innards colourfully spread out across the tapestry of Hogwarts's walls in a fleshly tribute to artistry. She silently chastised herself for the loss of control.

"It bloody well is." He snarled. He walked up to her and, using his height to his advantage, tapped her forehead. "If they catch you, they'd mine your mind for information, and then we'd both either be in Azkaban, or worse, at the Dark Lord's mercy. Do whatever the fuck you want with yourself, but I won't let you condemn me and my family to a second death over someone as utterly fucking insignificant as Dolores Umbridge."

Hermione sighed. He was very touchy about his family, and she respected that. Bar his bursts of rage, it was the only semblance of humanity he'd shown in his time as spy. "Ok, look, I'm sorry. Maybe I overreacted." She gripped his elbow and led him away from the hall, lest someone hear them. "But that woman is _vile_, as is the rest of your house. I can't just... forget that. I tried, I honestly did, but I can't."

"I am aware," Draco said, not meeting her eyes. He'd deflated too; his cheeks, which a moment ago had been ashen, were slowly returning to their pallid hue. "And unlike Dumbledore, I'm not big on second chances, so go ahead and do to them whatsoever you wish to. But you can't kill them this year, and you can't kill them here. It'll only lead to trouble— and you and I cannot afford that."

_You and I. _There was a time when that meant something, though it had been a particularly dark time when she was perhaps not in the right state of mind. She'd felt a spark, turned to him as a source of temporal joy, thought there was something between them; though of course she'd never been sure what to call it and had known for sure that it'd never go anywhere. He was the only man she'd been with after Ron died, because somehow, in some way, they both just seemed to understand the other and expected from each other nothing beyond the odd hour stolen away from their plotting of ways to delay their slow march to death— failure at that time was an inevitability. Then he'd set her up to die, and though she'd seen in his eye that he'd do it if he had to, she was still disappointed.

There were other pressing matters now, and she had no time for men anymore, none whatsoever—not for him, and not for Ron, to whom she had been married in another life, because that was a clusterfuck of a different kind that she didn't currently even wish to contemplate on.

"I should sleep," she said lightly. "It's been a rough day." He offered a wan nod and stepped away, started to make his way back to the great hall.

"Thank you, Draco. For stopping me today from doing something silly," she called out, to which he turned, gave her a long look, and then slowly offered a lopsided smirk and an ironic salute.

She drifted back to her dormitory, and he, head bowed, started his slow journey to the great hall, where the plates were finally put away and Dumbledore's somnolent voice solemnly echoed the need for unity and amity in these dire times...

**Author's Note:**

> Suggestions and queries are welcome. Please consider taking a minute and leaving a review. It really makes my day when I receive any. Thanks for reading, and have a wonderful week!


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